In the early evening of October 29, 2012, a five-foot swell from the Atlantic Ocean inundated the Freak Bar, the carnivalesque epicenter of Coney Island pop culture. Pouring past the boardwalk, the surge of corrosive salt water arrived at Surf Avenue thick with debris. Dick Zigun—the sixty-four-year-old tattooed impresario of the nonprofit that administers the bar and the iconic circus sideshow next door (a live ten-act spectacle featuring, among other oddities, a contortionist, a sword swallower, and a snake charmer)—was devastated. “Most of what we had didn’t survive,” he said on a recent Saturday afternoon at the bar, over a Coney Island Mermaid Pilsner. (No liquor here, but on a hot summer day the beer and wine offerings—which also include the home-town brewery’s watermelon ale—are refreshment enough.) Among the casualties was Zigun’s 1963 Seeburg jukebox. Gone, too, were scores of antique tchotchkes he had collected over three decades. With guidance from FEMA, an ad-hoc six-person recovery crew led by a former fire-eater salvaged what it could. A cherry-red countertop was re-created with steel and sealed wood, and the remaining ornaments migrated to conspicuously higher ground. By summer, the Freak Bar had reprised its role as the peninsula’s premier chamber of Coney Island kitsch, and as a quiet oasis for curious wayfarers seeking refuge from the sun. “Some day, the water is going to come back,” Zigun said, with cheery stoicism. “We’re much better prepared.” As a cavalier jab to the gods, he had cartoonish wave lines decaled across the windows, marking the height of the storm water. Suddenly, a loud siren blared, signalling to patrons in board shorts and bikinis that the next freak show would soon begin. ♦